What I Learned Sending 70,000+ Cold Emails a Month (Post-Exit)

Hey guys, Since exiting my last business, I’ve been running high-volume cold email campaigns, both for myself and a few close partners. I currently generate 100+ monthly partnership conversations for an eCom brand and have built infrastructure handling 70,000+ emails/month across multiple clients. Since I’m also running a unique fund of my own, I figured I’d share a few tips and tricks that have worked for me: 1. For most of you, cold email is not the magic bullet you are looking for. Most searchers I’ve spoken to have a really tiny TAM for businesses in their buy box. Cold email works best for TAM’s above 50,000 contacts/companies, because you need large volume for it to work really well. If your universe of potential target companies is only a few thousand, you can still email, but you don’t need anything sophisticated. 2. A good baseline to aim for is a 3% reply rate, with 30% of those being positive, with the aim of improving that as much as possible. If you can’t get to that baseline, either your email infrastructure is bad, your market is saturated, or your offer sucks. 3. If you're serious about deliverability, stop spinning up inboxes yourself. The pros all use inbox resellers. I use PremiumInboxes.com: they handle all the technical setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and it's cheaper than doing it manually (~$3/inbox/month). They tap into .EDU and Indian hosting panels, and are able to resell those to you for super cheap. They also set the emails up directly in your email sequencer (like Instantly or Smartlead) If you want to go higher-end, use Hypertide.io to warm and manage Outlook inboxes. Hypertide is like $1500 to set up, but its especially useful if you're targeting white-collar verticals, where Outlook's spam filters are notoriously tricky. 4. If you're only sourcing from Apollo and LinkedIn, you're already too late. Everyone's pulling from those databases. If you want a real edge, use tools like Discolike.com. It scrapes the entire internet for sites similar to the ones you feed it, uncovering target companies that don’t show up on LinkedIn, Apollo, Facebook, or the usual lists. This is how you find companies no one else is chasing. Its a little technical to setup up, but its not too bad, especially if you have a tech person on your team. 5. Have a really compelling offer, and something unique about your outreach. Before I sold my business, I had lots of searchers and PE people reach out. It was all a blur of Ivy-League type people who all said the same thing. Frankly, going to Harvard is not the differentiator you think it is, and most normal people don’t know or care what McKinsey is. Most searchers are just commodities, and commodities are judged on one thing only; price. Do something to stand out. Hire a marching band to serenade them at their HQ, or send them puppies, anything but a cold email or letter about how you’re a Baker Scholar. They don’t need another vanilla Ivy MBA telling them they will cherish their legacies. 6. Be a monopoly buyer. All the best products that Ive done outbound for have had a dominant quality about them with a no-brainer offer; its either you buy their product, or you buy nothing. As an example, I’m currently generating partnerships for a friend’s THC brand that has a super compelling offer; it’s the cheapest price for the most buzz. No one else can beat that offer, so people are converting on our offer like crazy. If there is any particular part about cold outreach you're more curious about, let me know.